Peace of mind with reliable backup

SGI-USA Finds Inner Peace with DXi

Virtualization and a new off-site data center brought the need for better data protection into clear focus for SGI-USA. The organization selected Quantum’s DXi® solution. The result: The IT team has been amazed by its seemingly unending storage appetite and extreme reliability, as well as outstanding Quantum service and support. 

Hit-and-Miss Backups

SGI-USA is a large Buddhist organization with a headquarters staff serving the needs of tens of thousands of members and volunteers spread across nearly 100 facilities. As a religious organization, it has a small IT team, yet vast and eclectic data storage requirements.

Over the years, SGI-USA’s storage equipment and retention practices had grown in an equally eclectic fashion. Unfortunately, that often meant backups were hit-and-miss, according to Ross Chapman, executive director of technology for SGI-USA.

“I’d come in that morning, and ask ‘Did the backups work? No? Okay, let’s try again…,’” he says. “But we’d increasingly find those failures when trying to restore, searching for a particular file only to find that we had a bad backup. That’s a problem.”

The turning point for SGI-USA was a simultaneous move to virtualization and an off-site colocation facility as a primary data center. With their virtual infrastructure connected across a local storage area network at an unattended facility, the last thing the IT team could afford was an unreliable data protection system.

So Chapman turned to a trusted IT reseller, ICC in Torrance, CA. ICC recommended Quantum’s DXi systems as the perfect answer. SGI-USA selected two 8TB DXi6700 Series appliances, placing the primary system at the new colocation facility and the second one at the organization’s Santa Monica headquarters for disaster recovery.

Benefits: Ease of Use, Dependability

Chapman says from the beginning, ease of use and dependability of the new system stood out. The reduced workload equates to about 25 percent of a work week for one IT staff member.

Other benefits include deduplication rates of 27:1, speedy backups, and restores in 20 minutes instead of days. Chapman also rated Quantum service and support as an 11.5 on a 1-to-10 scale.

“Our backup operation is not only remarkably faster, but I’d say it’s as close to maintenance- and operator-free as you can get,” reports Chapman. “We check logs as a best practice, but really you can practically configure it and forget it. That saves a ton of time and heartache.”